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This article was taken from the March 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
Remember downloading those 128kbps MP3s from Napster back in the day? Their wobbly, low-bitrate encoding sounds horrible today. Yet you can upgrade to higher-quality versions without losing any precious iTunes metadata -- and unlike the methods by which you may have acquired them, this is legal.
1. Sign up for iTunes Match
Apple offers a service called iTunes Match, which currently costs £21.99 per year. Its main selling point is that it lets you access all the music you own -- regardless of where you originally purchased (or "acquired") it from, and makes it available on all your Apple devices. It also lets you upgrade your music library's files. (Amazon has a similar service called Cloud Player, but it won't maintain your metadata, play counts or playlist entries.)
2. Scan your library
When you have iTunes Match set up on your Mac or PC, let it scan your entire music library. It may take only a few minutes or a few hours, depending on how much music you have. This process makes audio fingerprints of your songs and matches those fingerprints to tracks available in Apple's iTunes Store.
3. Delete your originals
After iTunes has scanned and matched songs on your computer, ensure you have the "iCloud Status" column visible (check the "View" menu) and look for music with "Matched" showing as its status. To upgrade a matched song or group of songs, first delete them from iTunes, but uncheck the option to also delete from iCloud.
4. Re-download your music
Your matched song has now been removed from your computer. But because iTunes matched it to a version it has in its store, it remains in your library with a little cloud icon next to it. Click this and a fresh 256kbps copy of that song or album will come down from iTunes as if you'd bought it there originally. Voilà!
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
